What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

• If youth knew if age could.
• Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
• The goal of all life is death.
• The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
• Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
• Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
• I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
• The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
• Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
• Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.